Crying Foul.

The sun is out, and even though we’ve only just crested from January into February, it feels like spring outside. The air is warm enough to shiver through a walk with just a sweater. The shadows aren’t too cold to stand in while the dog sniffs absently at whatever he smells. The little birds are chirping animatedly from the underbrush. And a thick floral scent from some of the earliest flowers hangs in the air and reminds me of honeysuckle. It’s not honeysuckle -- it’s not a vine, and the flowers are small, white, and practically petalless – but it smells like honeysuckle, and it’s blooming between the apartment buildings where we walk.

The other day, I was reading an essay by G.K. Chesterton: “In Praise of Grey,” or maybe it was “In Defense of Grey.” In it he talks about weather, and how English people should not complain about their weather because they are the only people in the world who have true weather. (I cry foul on that. Chesterton had obviously never visited the west coast of America, where he would have found weather remarkably like his own.) He says that people should never sneer at grey weather because grey is the most various and obliging kind of weather. It can be soft like cashmere or threatening like judgment. It brings out the bright colors in one’s surroundings and lets them speak for themselves. Furthermore grey represents a state of doubt or hope: hope that something else might be coming in a little while.

I sympathize with Mr. Chesterton. I can enjoy a grey day and appreciate the difference between puffy clouds, rain clouds, thunderclouds, and hanging mist. I know how to look at the skies and wish that the clouds would give way to an invigorating rain or wander through our local park and feel that faint fairy chill that a low lying fog brings in. But I respectfully submit that when a person feels hope on a grey day, the supreme hope is for a day like this. Dwellers of cloudy climes may find grey friendly, familiar, and even interesting, but when we hope, we hope for sun, except for the odd occasions that we hope for snow.

Grey can be glorious. Clouds add character to any skyscape. A pure blue sky, especially in a flat landscape, can be overwhelming, but add a few big, puffy clouds, and the whole things becomes playful, like the heavens decided to go sailing. Add some charcoal overtones to those clouds, and the sky becomes dramatic with a touch of impending downpour and a sense that something big might happen. Every sunset or sunrise is better for having clouds around it. They bring out more color and give the color more surfaces to play on. Even a solid grey sky can be exciting if there is some variety or energy in the clouds.

But grey is ultimately limiting. Every parent has had or will have to explain to a child that the sun doesn’t really go away when the clouds come out. It just hides behind them. The clouds cover it up. Clouds come between us and the sun, between us and the blue expanse above us, and if they stay around long enough, we begin to forget that it’s there. Sure, we know that if we got in an airplane (I almost wrote aeroplane, that’s how enmeshed in Chesterton I am at the moment), we could go above the clouds and see the vast blue sky and the rays of the sun, even more brilliant for being above the smoke and the dust held in by the clouds. However, our daily practical consciousnesses forget that the blue exists. The spectrum of our sight adjusts to focus that much closer to the ground. It’s like we’ve had eternity cut off from us in a physical way. We forget to think in terms of the whole when the half is pressing in on us.

That’s why a clear blue day like today is so invigorating to people who live in cloudy climates like ours. A clear day and a big blue sky are a revelation in a very real, physical way. The world comes back into perspective, and we remember the sublime sense that we are very small creatures in a big, beautiful world. The sky is big and deep, and it’s not empty either. It’s blue and vast and full of who knows what. Grey may make the individual object, the brilliant leaf or the immediate building, stand out more, but blue brings them all together in the vast consciousness that there is one great sky and we are all beneath it. On a day like today, I feel like I can see the whole world if I just get high enough or walk far enough, and moreover, if I could see it, I could understand it all somehow. That’s the power of, ahem, illumination.